The Border Is All Around Us, and It’s Growing

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CreditCreditIllustration by Derek Brahney

By Laila Lalami

April 25, 2017

The Border Patrol agent watched our Prius approach, then signaled for us to stop. Behind him stood several others in green uniforms, hands resting on holsters, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. German shepherds panted in the heat. “Are you all U.S. citizens?” the agent asked, leaning against the driver’s-side window and glancing around our car. “Yes,” said one of my companions, an artist from Iowa. “Yes,” echoed the other, a poet from Connecticut. Then it was my turn. “Yes,” I said. The agent’s gaze lingered on me for a moment. Then he stood up and waved us through the border.

Except this was not a border: This was the middle of Interstate 10 between El Paso and Marfa, Tex. No matter. At the Sierra Blanca checkpoint, agents can make arrests for drugs or weapons, share information with federal agencies and turn undocumented immigrants over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. There are many such checkpoints scattered throughout the continental United States — borders within borders.

Borders mark the contours of nations, states, even cities, defining them by separating them from all others. A border can be natural — an ocean, a river, a chain of mountains — or it can be artificial, splitting a homogeneous landscape into two. Often it is highly literal, announcing itself in the shape of a concrete wall, a sand berm, a tall fence topped with barbed wire. But whatever form it takes, a border always conveys meaning. Hours before my encounter with the Border Patrol, as the airplane I was on began its descent, I saw from my window seat the wall that separates El Paso from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. On one side were gleaming towers, giant freeways and sprawling parks; on the other, homes huddling together in the afternoon light, winding streets and patches of dry grass. Here you will find safety and prosperity, the wall seemed to say, but over there lie danger and poverty. It’s a message that ignores the cities’ joint history, language and cultures. But it is simple — one might say simplistic — and that is what gives it power.

For much of the United States’ history, national frontiers were fluid, expanding through territorial conquest and purchases. But at the start of the 20th century, as Arizona and New Mexico approached statehood and the country’s continental borders became stable, so did the desire to secure them and police them — first through congressional acts that prohibited immigration from certain countries and later through the building of fences and walls. During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump often promised to extend a wall along the Southern border and have Mexico pay for it. At his rallies, this promise was met with cheers and chants of “Build that wall!” When Vicente Fox, a former president of Mexico, declared that his nation had no intention of paying for any such wall, Trump’s response was, “The wall just got 10 feet higher.” The more it was challenged, the higher it became, as if literalizing the border could make all debate about it disappear.

Whether the administration can find the money to construct an immense border wall remains to be seen. In the meantime, the legal apparatus around it is already being built. This month, speaking to Customs and Border Protection officers in Nogales, Ariz., Attorney General Jeff Sessions promised them “more tools in your fight against criminal aliens” — including charging immigrants who repeatedly cross into the United States illegally with felonies and, when possible, with document fraud and aggravated identity theft, which can carry mandatory prison time. His language was the language of war: Nogales, Sessions said, was “ground zero” in the fight to secure the border, a place where “ranchers work each day to make an honest living” while under threat from “criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into war zones, that rape and kill innocent civilians.” Under the new administration, he said, his Justice Department was prepared for the fight: “It is here, on this sliver of land, on this border, where we first take our stand.”

In this kind of rhetoric, the border separates not just nationals from foreigners, rich from poor and north from south, but also order from chaos, civilization from barbarians, decent people from criminals. Location becomes character, with everything that designation entails. A person is either American and an honest worker, or she is not American and is a criminal alien. The two categories are seen as inherent and inflexible.

In January, Trump signed an executive order temporarily barring nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, even if they were green-card holders or refugees who had already been cleared for resettlement. But as reports emerged of families separated by the order, passengers stranded thousands of miles from home, even an infant being denied scheduled surgery, the full effect of this virtual wall revealed itself. By the time the ban was lifted by federal courts, the experience had already brought to the national consciousness a renewed awareness of what happens at the border. In this in-between space, rights we take for granted disappear. At points of entry to the United States, nobody — not even American citizens or permanent residents — is fully protected by the Fourth Amendment, which safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures. Customs and Border Protection officers can search luggage as well as phones, tablets and laptops. Occasionally they ask for online browsing histories and passwords to social-media accounts. A poorly phrased joke on Twitter, a compromising picture on a private Instagram account, a Facebook argument with a crazy uncle — all these could be readable by C.B.P. officers, entirely at their discretion. Again, the border sends a message: Watch what you say.

The border’s messages always carry with them hints of violence. In the 19th century, the American frontier was a place of conquest, a place where laws did not apply and deadly clashes could happen at any moment. That aura of risk and brutality still hangs over airports, the closest thing we have to frontier outposts and the gateways to cross-border travel. When travelers step into the secure area of an airport, they leave behind bottles of water, take off their shoes and expose their bodies to X-rays, all for the sake of protecting themselves from the potential violence of terrorists. But this system can perpetrate violence by itself. This month, a ticketed passenger who refused to give up his seat on a United Airlines flight from O’Hare International Airport in Chicago was brutally dragged away by the police. David Dao’s injuries, according to his lawyer, Thomas Demetrio, include a concussion, a broken nose, two lost teeth and sinus damage that could require surgery. Demetrio went on to ask, “Are we going to just continue to be treated like cattle?”

This dehumanization is a common feature of the border. Some years ago, returning home from a holiday in Morocco, my husband and I passed through immigration at Kennedy Airport. The border agent glanced at my passport, which lists Morocco as my place of birth. Then she looked at my husband’s and, with a chuckle, asked him how many camels he had traded for me. Even in my shock, I understood that what the agent was trying to assert was her own authority, her superiority over me. If I had dared to challenge her, I might have ended up subject to a secondary search and further questioning. My silence was the price that the border demanded.

Border walls are literal expressions of our worst fears. Terrorists, rapists, drug dealers and various “bad hombres” are all said to come from somewhere else; drawing lines, we are told, will keep us safe from them. But the lines keep multiplying. What formally counts as the border, according to the United States government, is not just the lines separating the United States from Canada and Mexico, but any American territory within 100 miles of the country’s perimeter, whether along land borders, ocean coasts or Great Lakes shores. That 100-mile strip of land encompasses almost entirely the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont — along with the most populated parts of many others, including California and Illinois. In total, the 100-mile-wide border zone is home to two-thirds of the nation’s population.

This is such a staggering fact that it bears repeating: The vast majority of Americans, roughly 200 million, are effectively living in the border zone. Any of these people could one day face checkpoints like the one I went through in Sierra Blanca, Tex. They can be asked about their citizenship and, if they fail to persuade the agent — because of how they look, act or sound — they can be detained. The Justice Department established these regulations in 1953 and, though they periodically attract attention, they have never been changed. As we move to erect and enforce more borders, this is another message worth apprehending: Borders do not simply keep others out. They also wall us in.

Laila Lalami is the author of “The Moor’s Account,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.